What Students Have to Say About EMI: Exploring University Students’ Perspectives on Changing the Learning/Teaching Language to English

Abstract

This study documents the perceptions and self-expressed experiences of eleven Catalan university students as they shift from learning in their first language(s), Catalan and/or Spanish, to learning in English. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of students' reflections in relation to: how disciplinary knowledge is transmitted and learned in English-medium instruction (EMI); the multilingual dynamics employed in the EMI class by both lecturers and students; the Englishlanguage teaching and learning events; and perceptions of students' own and their classmates' performance. It outlines the main foci identified through thematic data analysis (Airey, 2011;Saldaña, 2013) of students' responses to a set of questions, considering their personal opinions regarding the implementation of EMI subjects as part of the internationalisation process of the university and offering the students' general views and concerns about content subjects taught in English. The findings suggest that students have a generally positive perspective on EMI subjects and they assign a pedagogical value to the L1(s). Yet, the paper also reports several students' concerns in relation to EMI implementation. Overall, these findings may lead to a better and deeper understanding of EMI in the context under study.

The Use of Questions in Master’s Oral Defences in English as an Academic Lingua Franca in Universities

“…English as the medium of instruction (EMI) has been gradually developed and applied in numerous universities in Asian countries to promote international competitiveness in higher education and attract more international students, and Taiwan is no exception. Arising from this, many studies have drawn attention to related aspects, such as institutional policies and practices of EMI (Lau & Lin, 2017;Lin, 2023;Vuong et al, 2021;Wu, 2023), curriculum development and course evaluation (Le & Tang, 2022;Liu et al, 2022), professional development (Graham & Eslami, 2023), intercultural interaction in academic settings (Lacaste et al, 2022;Nguyen, 2021), academic assessment (Lin, 2020), students' perspective on EMI (Hsu, 2023;Lan, 2022;Moncada-Comas, 2022), EMI lectures in online settings (Picciuolo, 2023), and language-content partnership at Chinese universities (Li et al, 2024). Nevertheless, how participants interact in EMI in the context of using English as an academic lingua franca lacks attention, not to mention oral forms of academic assessment in higher education and oral defences for theses and dissertations, which have rarely been explored because of their blocked nature and the difficulty of collecting oral defence data.…”